mortal woes.’ Occasionally, for a moment as it were, the passions of repulsed patriotism and of pent-up humanity would break bounds, and seek expression in a form which scholars could scarce interpret or priests control. With their law grudged to them and their land denied, ‘their many thoughts and wise,’ under cruel restraint, were dwindling into impotent dreams or flashing out in wild unlikeness of wisdom. It was in the summer of the year 1666 that some such incomprehensible craze seemed to possess the ancient city of Smyrna. The sleepy stillness of the narrow streets was jarred by a thousand confused and unaccustomed sounds. The slow, smooth current of Eastern life seemed of a sudden stirred into a whirl of excited eddies. Men and women in swift-changing groups were sobbing, praying, laughing in a breath, their quick gesticulations in curious contrast with their sober, shabby garments, and their patient, pathetic eyes. And strangest thing of all, it was on a prophet in his own country, in the very city of his birth, that this extraordinary enthusiasm of greeting was being expended, and the name of the prophet was Sabbathai, son of Mordecai. Mordecai Zevi, the father, had dwelt among these townsfolk of Smyrna, dealing in money and dying of gout, and Sabbathai Zevi, the son, had been brought up among them, and not so many years since had been banished by them. In that passionately absorbed crowd there must have been many a middle-aged man old enough to remember how this turbulent son of the commonplace old broker had been sent forth from the city, and the gates shut on him in anger and contempt; and some there surely must have been who knew of his subsequent career. But if it were so, there were none sane enough to deduce a moral. It was in the character of Messiah and Deliverer that Sabbathai had come back to Smyrna, and long-dead hope, quickened into life at the very words, was strong enough to strangle a whole host of resistant memories, though, in truth, there was a great deal to forget. It had been at the instance of the religious authorities of the place, whose susceptibilities were shocked by the utterance of opinions advanced enough to provoke a tumult in the synagogue, that the young man had been expelled from the city. To young and ardent spirits in that crowd it is possible that this early experience of Sabbathai bore a very colourable imitation of martyrdom, and the life in exile that followed it may have appealed to their imaginations as the most fitting of preparations for a prophet. But then unfortunately Sabbathai’s life in exile had not been that of a hermit, nor altogether of a sort to fit into any exalted theories. Authentic news had certainly come of him as a traveller in the Morea and in Syria, and rumours had been rife concerning travelling companions. Three successive marriages, it was said, had taken place, followed in each instance by unedifying quarrels and divorce.